Anarchists threaten former Ansaldo executive

25 July 2012

Ansaldo Nucleare remains among the targets of an Italian anarchist group, with threats to a former senior staff member coming after an attack on the company's CEO in May.

Wire agency ANSA reported that threatening letters were sent yesterday to Carlo Castellano by the Federazione Anarchica Informale (FAI), the group that claimed responsibility for shooting the Ansaldo Nucleare CEO, Roberto Adinolfi, in the leg on 7 May. Although Castellano now works for another Ansaldo subsidiary, Esaote, he was shot in the legs in a similar attack when working as Ansaldo Nucleare's director of planning in 1977. Observers worry that actions by the FAI could signal a return to the political violence of that decade.

The FAI is suspected of involvement in several letter-bomb attacks across Europe on targets including Deutsche Bank, the Italian tax collection agency, Equitalia, and a member of the European Parliament. In March last year an FAI letter bomb exploded and injured two people in the offices of Swissnuclear, the nuclear energy section of the trade body, Swisselectric.

Ansaldo Nucleare offers a range of engineering services, including the manufacture, installation and maintenance of major reactor components. It has taken prominent roles in the completion of Romania's Cernavoda 1 and 2 as well as Slovakia's Mochiovce 3 and 4. The company is also contributing to AP1000 construction at Sanmen in China and has done much work on the decommissioning of Italy's fomer nuclear power fleet.

The firm is part of the Finnmechanica engineering group, which has annual revenues of over €18 billion, counts over 40,000 employees in Italy and is 30% owned by the country's government. A letter from the FAI in May claimed responsibility for the attack on Adinolfi and attempted to justify it based on an exaggerated fear of nuclear accidents and opposition to several of Finnmechanica's areas of activity.